Caroline Quentin: ‘As the years go by, I enjoy my sexuality more’

She may be playing a prostitute in a bawdy remake of Fanny Hill complete with love truncheon jokes, but Caroline Quentin wants to show the horrors of the trade too. She explains why sex is great in your 50s – and why Game of Thrones is just far too nude

‘Young people are sexualised so quickly, for profit, now. We have to guard against it and talk about it’ …Caroline Quentin. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian

Caroline Quentin is writhing on a bench, her head between the legs of a young man. She may or may not be being whipped – it’s hard to tell, this being an early rehearsal without props, though the young man, the actor Mawgan Gyles, has tucked his jogging bottoms into a pair of riding boots, the better to get into the part. I sit down in time to see Quentin being walloped across the face with his giant penis; her following lines include the phrases “flesh brush” and “love truncheon”. All this and it’s not yet lunchtime. Next, Quentin is shown how to ride Gyles like a horse and then Michael Oakley, the director, comes over to tell me that, at the end of the scene, Quentin will be swinging from a chandelier. Of course she will.

The Life and Times of Fanny Hill, a play by April De Angelis, is based on the pornographic novel by John Cleland about a country girl who falls into a life working in Georgian brothels. Cleland’s first instalment, published in 1748, was banned – and the play is an attempt to retell Fanny’s story from her own point of view. In Cleland’s novel, his protagonist is a prostitute who derives pleasure from her work; in De Angelis’s repositioning, first staged in 1991, Fanny is given a voice.

“Because the novel was written by a man, I was concerned it was going to be the ‘happy hooker’ story,” says Quentin, when she finally takes a break from rehearsals at Bristol Old Vic, her cheeks a little flushed. “I was really glad to find that what April has done is give Fanny control of her own story – I love that notion of being empowered by telling your story. The truth about the life of a prostitute keeps bleeding through into the fantasy, which is difficult because the readers of Cleland’s novel didn’t want to know. In April’s version, we get an insight into what it was like to be impoverished, diseased, probably an alcoholic, to have had and lost babies, to have been raped and abused.”

Oakley, who worked with Quentin in a recent production of Relative Values, sold the part to her by highlighting how timely the play seemed, more so even than when it was first performed. “As I was reading it,” Quentin says, “on the radio comes a story of girls being trafficked, of women being treated as commodities, their lives meaning nothing to the people who used them.” Stories were emerging from the victims of Jimmy Savile and the young girls abused in Rochdaleand Rotherham. “It was so hard for them to have a voice. People don’t want to hear it, they don’t want the truth because it’s hideous and it makes us look at ourselves and address something unpleasant in our nature.”

‘I was really glad to find that this version gives Fanny control of her own story’ … Caroline Quentin in The Life and Times of Fanny Hill. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/Guardian

More widely, our culture is far more sexualised than it was even in the early 1990s, when De Angelis wrote the play. “I saw Game of Thrones the other day and all the women were nude,” says Quentin. “When did that become all right? Who’s in charge of that?” She sighs. “I have a 15-year-old daughter and I know what’s out there. It makes me ache with fear. Young people are sexualised so quickly, for profit, now. We have to guard against it and talk about it. People don’t want to and – truthfully – I don’t want to either, but to be a responsible parent you have to have those conversations, about stuff on the internet, images of girls in the media, and early sex.”

That’s not to say the play is relentlessly grim. It’s supposed to be darkly comic, a bawdy romp with moments of bleakness to remind you what life would really have been like for women forced to work in the streets outside this theatre, built not long after Cleland’s novel was published.

Quentin is still best known for comedy, most famously as the long-suffering Dorothy in Men Behaving Badly (long-suffering in real life too, having campaigned in rehearsals for the female characters to be given better jokes). Although she played the lead in the crime drama Blue Murder – and one of her early jobs was as a prostitute in the first cast of Les Misérables – many of her most recent TV roles have been firmly in the mum mould (one of whom is in ITV2’s new post-apocalyptic comedy Cockroaches).

Last year Quentin, who is 54, was out of work for seven months and wondered if her career was over, or at least on hold until she was old enough to play grannies. Had she noticed the roles offered to her changing? “Oh my God. Completely. On TV, you never play the protagonist now – you’re always someone’s mum, always sidelined. It’s pretty much what you’d expect.” How does that make her feel? A small laugh. “It makes me sad for the world. I get to do other stuff on stage and keep my challenges alive, but if I had to make a living out of television now, I’d be pretty depressed, because I don’t get sent anything of any appeal, any meat.”

What is striking about Fanny Hill – in a good way – is that we get to see a woman in middle age in an overtly sexual role, even if it’s ultimately one of powerlessness and abuse. But it highlights the lack of stories that acknowledge an older woman’s sex life. “Once you’re over 40, and over 50 particularly, people don’t perceive you as a sexual being any more,” she says. “It’s certainly not true in my own life. I find getting older enjoyable and, as the years have gone on, I’ve enjoyed my sexuality more. I don’t feel asexual just because I’m over a certain age. Quite the reverse actually.”

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